9781422271810

THE PRE RAPHAELITES

Ansel Adams

John James Audubon Mary Cassatt Paul Cézanne Leonardo Da Vinci Edgar Degas The Hudson River School Michelangelo Claude Monet The Pre-Raphaelites Pierre-Auguste Renoir Vincent Van Gogh Frank Lloyd Wright

THE PRE RAPHAELITES

MASON CREST MIAMI

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Front cover: The Lady of Shalott (1888) John William Waterhouse Page 1: La Belle Dame sans Merci (1893) John William Waterhouse Page 2–3: Love Among the Ruins (c. 1873) Edward Burne-Jones

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Art of The Pre-Raphaelites 7 Series Glossary of Key Terms 92

Index 94 List of Plates 96

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

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MASTERS OF ART

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English painters, poets, and art critics. Also known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the movement was founded in 1848 by seven members: William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner. The principles of the Pre-Raphaelites were shared with other artists of the period including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones, and John William Waterhouse, to name but a few. These young artists were inspired by the artwork of early Italian painters before Raphael, as well as fifteenth-century Flemish art. They were some of the first to complete artwork outdoors, in an effort to capture the minute details found in nature.

THE ART OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

T he Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, originally consisting of a secret group of seven young men, was formed in 1848 in London and lasted effectively for about five years. It was an artistic group of young student painters in the Royal Academy Schools and some of their friends, a very small part of the revolutionary spirit then motivating change throughout Europe at the point in history known as the “Year of Revolutions.” Following the French

Revolution of 1789 and the domination of Europe by the imperial ambition of Napoleon, 1848 heralded the overthrow of most European dynasties. A reformist spirit, inspired by a zeal for social justice introduced by the French Revolution, became a universal ambition in all European countries. It was, significantly, the year in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto , forecasting the fall of capitalism and the rise of a socialist society. In Britain, where Marx had settled and lived for the remainder of his life, events were less dramatic and did not result in the overthrow of monarchy or government, although the young Queen Victoria, who had come to the throne in 1837, was not yet secure on her throne or as loved and revered by the populace as she later became. Nevertheless, there were disturbances arising from the repeal of the Corn Laws and the growth of a strong national public feeling for government reforms led by a group known as the Chartists, the nearest that Britain came to overt active revolutionaries. In April of 1848, they organized a great meeting on Kennington Common in south London, which the Chartists hoped would

PLATE 1 Fair Rosamund (1854) Arthur Hughes Oil on canvas, 15 3 ⁄

4 x 12 inches (40 x 30.5 cm)

The Pre-Raphaelites were often inspired by medieval tales, and here Arthur Hughes portrayed the legend of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II of England, who in 1176 is said to have poisoned Rosamund Clifford, the king’s beautiful mistress and true love. Eleanor can be seen lurking in the doorway.

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relaxing hands; it is a white poppy, because Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died of an overdose of laudanum, an opiate. The painting was also a memorial to her, and in a later letter, Rossetti wrote that “the picture must of course not be viewed as a representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual transfiguration.” In the background, on the right, Dante gazes across to the figure of love on the left.

PLATE 2 Beata Beatrix (1863) Dante Gabriel Rossetti Oil on canvas, 34 x 26 inches (86.5 x 66 cm)

The poet Dante was an important figure of influence and inspiration to the Rossetti family, and this work represents the death of Dante’s Beatrice, who sits trance like while the messenger of death in the shape of a bird drops a poppy, a symbol of remembrance, into her

provide evidence of the strong public desire for parliamentary and legal reform. In the event, the meeting was something of a fiasco, but it did attract the interest of many young Reformist enthusiasts, among them two young students from the Royal Academy Schools in central London who traveled on foot to the meeting. It is important to emphasize the artistic revolution they contemplated—without at that moment knowing what it should be. The movement that quickly originated from this youthful enthusiasm was one of the most significant in the formation of a new philosophy of painting that, despite the short life of the movement, actually did initiate changes that had a profound effect on British painting after the mid-nineteenth century. While for us in the twenty-first century the Modern Revolution in painting is more often seen to have begun with Impressionism in France about twenty years later than the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain, the beginnings of great changes can be discerned much earlier in France at the time of the revolution itself. The court art of Louis XV, of Boucher, Fragonard, and Lancret, represented all that the ordinary people most detested and that the intellectual politicians of the Revolution wished to replace with an art of social responsibility after the

salacious frivolity of royal privilege. At least that is how they perceived it, and an alternative was available in what is called Neo-Classicism. Its leader was Jacques-Louis David, a friend of Robespierre and a supporter of the Revolution, who created moral tracts espousing the cause of the Revolution in pictorial form. It was the beginning, not only of a new way of painting and new subject matter, but also the introduction of a new seriousness of purpose reflected in a determined Historicism. The subjects were taken largely from Roman history, thus enlarging the discussion of what constituted the proper role of art. It is not possible, in this short introduction, to pursue this matter through the various developments that occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century in France, but it is important to emphasize that the visual arts were in a process of change through the whole of the century, up to and following the Impressionists. The situation in British art was different. From the beginning of the century, a number of figures had emerged whose stature and influence in the arts was considerable. A realism in the treatment of nature—on the one hand, romantic with J.M.W. Turner, academic with John Constable, and spiritual or mystical with William Blake—had appeared in British painting without a

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PLATE 3 Bocca Baciata (1859) Dante Gabriel Rossetti Oil on canvas, 12 1 ⁄ 2 x 6 2 ⁄

3 inches (32 x 27 cm)

This painting was crafted at a turning point in Rossetti’s career. It was his first work of a single female figure. Rossetti established this style that was later to become the signature of his work. The model was Fanny Cornforth, the principal inspiration for Rossetti’s sensuous and beautiful figures.

parallel in France. By the time the Pre-Raphaelites were formed in 1848, there was considerable uncertainty within the art establishment as to the future direction of painting. Some positive direction was needed, some standards established. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its mysterious cryptogram “PRB” appearing on its paintings, provided a different if unspecified direction. It seemed to be concerned with a new form of Realism, part spiritually motivated, part presenting a new sense of actuality. One of the difficulties inherent in any study of the Brotherhood derives, for instance, from the fact that what the Pre-Raphaelites inaugurated was so quickly adopted or assimilated into the generality of later Victorian painting that it is not immediately evident to the observer which are Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which are influenced by the movement, and which have absorbed enough of the technique and philosophy for different pictorial ends. The disentanglement of this complex scene is not easy, and every writer on the subject will make different selections to illustrate particular points from a plethora of work available. The choice is therefore a personal one and with so much to choose from is unavoidably limited.

It has been necessary to concentrate on the central, most important figures of the Brotherhood itself as well as some of its followers. Since its foundation in the eighteenth century under the presidency of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a determined intellectual Classicist, the Royal Academy had assumed an authority over the standards of British art and became the recognized home of academic excellence. It would not have seemed appropriate for artists, during this early period, to have joined in with groups or movements. Their ambition would have been individual acceptance within the official system: to become a member of the Royal Academy (RA) or, in France, the Académie and the annual Salon. As a result, it is something of a surprise to encounter, in 1848, the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, secretly devoted to a revolutionary artistic program that became, in the event, the first of the significantly influential art movements of the century. The Brotherhood comprised three highly talented painters, one less talented, one described as a painter who left no paintings, a sculptor, and the brother of one of the three who became a writer and art critic and the

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end, he searched, with Millais, for a suitable location and decided on a field near Ewell in Surrey, which he painted daily, on site, from the beginning of July 1851 to the end of October. The landscape was his principal interest, but before he returned to London with a white area in which he would introduce the figures, he painted the sheep. These were not good or willing sitters and had to be captured and held by servants. The shepherd was a professional model, and the shepherdess a local Ewell girl. There is the inevitable symbolism in the painting of the hireling shepherd neglecting his responsibilities while showing his girlfriend a death’s head moth he has caught (which Hunt used as a representation of superstition).

PLATE 4 The Hireling Shepherd (1851)

William Holman Hunt Oil on canvas, 30 x 42 1 ⁄

2 inches (76.2 x 108 cm)

Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? Thy sheep be in the corn: And for one blast of thy minikin mouth, Thy sheep shall take no harm.

This quotation from Shakespeare (Edgar’s song in King Lear) accompanied what Hunt intended as a depiction of real peasants in an actual setting to counteract, as he saw it, the baleful influence of the pretty Romanticism that was usually present in pictures of rural life. To that

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PLATE 5 Self-Portrait (1867) William Holman Hunt Oil on canvas, 40 1 ⁄ 2 x 28 1 ⁄

2 inches (103.5 x 73 cm)

Movement’s chief apologist. Strictly, these seven were the only actual members of the Brotherhood. Had Pre Raphaelitism as an idea, intention, philosophical and technical artistic inspiration, or approach depended entirely on this original group, it almost certainly would not have attained the public recognition, respect, and regard that it currently holds. The “Brothers” were joined by friends and followers, and the result was a large and wide-ranging body of work created during the middle and later years of the nineteenth century in Britain that was different from the then-dominant Academic art. The significance of 1848 as the Year of Revolutions is important to the story of Pre-Raphaelitism. Among the many events of the year of change in European history was the meeting of the Chartists on Kennington Common on April 10. That organized group’s attempt to initiate parliamentary reform, supposedly backed by more than five million signatures, caused deep concern. Queen Victoria left London in response to fears of riots, the Houses of Parliament were protected by guns and soldiers sent there by the Duke of Wellington, and the police were mobilized. Although the meeting failed in its intention to march on Westminster it attracted an estimated 25,000 to 100,000 people, among them two young students from the Royal Academy Schools, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, who were inspired to thoughts of artistic revolution as a result. It was the unlikely initiatory origin of Pre-Raphaelitism. The third important member of the Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had seen a painting by Hunt, inspired by a poem of Keats. Rossetti In this remarkable self-portrait, Holman Hunt portrayed himself in Middle Eastern attire. He is dressed as a Grand Master from an earlier time.

admired the painting, was devoted to Keats’s poetry, became anxious to learn from Hunt, and sought him out at the Academy Schools. At that time, Millais was nineteen, Rossetti was twenty, and Hunt twenty-one, and the Brotherhood was the product of their youthful enthusiasm and revolutionary distaste for (as they saw it) the arid and superficial Academic style. They were joined by Rossetti’s brother William Michael, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, and Frederic George Stephens, who together formed the original seven members of the Brotherhood. Before considering the movement itself, it is perhaps important to note some significant and relevant aspects of Victorian society and history. In the eighteenth century,

the great Industrial Revolution was taking place in Britain, and by the early nineteenth century, this was 13

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